Ida Vera Simonton's Imperial Masquerades: Gender and the Rise of a Female African Expert in Progressive-Era America

Ida Vera Simonton, a New York socialite, visited the French colony of Gabon in 1906 and 1907. Her subsequent narratives about her stay demonstrate a very ambiguous view of the horrors of European colonialism that she claimed to despise and the amoral nature of Africans. Simonton ultimately employed her stay in Gabon to claim a right to form female self-defense squads in New York and to act as an independent defender of white women. She also used her playful manipulation of gender anxieties to gain newspaper attention and the patronage of noted author Theodore Dreiser, who ended up ensuring the publication of her 1912 novel Hell’s Playground. By carefully shaping her public persona to alternately appropriate discourses of masculine regeneration through empire and to highlight her female vulnerability, she made herself into a provocative spectacle. In an ironic twist given how much Simonton embellished on her own experiences, Broadway producers in 1925 plagiarized her Hell's Playground in their successful play White Cargo. Simonton successfully sued for damages, thus upholding her highly edited version of her trip in law. Her writings expose the intersections of racial anxieties, gendered visions of empire, and feminist aspirations in the United States during the Progressive Era.